New Update Brave Search is coming

enaph

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Today Brave announced the acquisition of Tailcat, the open search engine developed by the team formerly responsible for the privacy search and browser products at Cliqz, a holding of Hubert Burda Media. Tailcat will become the foundation of Brave Search. Brave Search and the Brave browser constitute the industry’s first independent, privacy-preserving alternative to Google Chrome and Google Search, which rely on tracking users across sites and have 70 percent and 92 percent market share, respectively.

Under the hood, nearly all of today’s search engines are either built by, or rely on, results from Big Tech companies. In contrast, the Tailcat search engine is built on top of a completely independent index, capable of delivering the quality people expect, but without compromising their privacy. Tailcat does not collect IP addresses or use personally identifiable information to improve search results.

Brave Search will join the family of privacy-preserving Brave products as consumers are increasingly demanding user-first alternatives to Big Tech. The Brave browser saw unprecedented growth in 2021, reaching over 25 million monthly active users. This mirrored the impressive migration to Signal, the privacy messaging platform, after WhatsApp announced a change to their privacy policies requiring data-sharing with Facebook.

Privacy is becoming mainstream. The Brave browser provides the stringent protections users demand, and Brave Search is being developed according to the same principles:

  1. Brave Search is private: it does not track or profile users.
  2. Brave Search is user-first: Brave serves the user first, not the advertising and data industries.
  3. Brave Search offers choice: We will provide options for ad-free paid search and ad-supported search. We are working on bringing private ads to search, as we’ve done for Brave user ads.
  4. Brave Search is independent: We will rely on anonymized contributions from the community to improve and refine Brave Search. Prior to this innovation, producing quality results could be achieved only by Big Tech companies, which took many years and tens of billions of dollars to crawl the entire Web continually.
  5. Brave Search is transparent: we will not use secret methods or algorithms to bias results. We will explore multiple community-curated open ranking models to ensure diversity, and prevent algorithmic biases and outright censorship.
  6. Brave Search is seamless: we will offer best-in-class integration between the browser and search without compromising privacy, from personalization to instant results as the user types.
  7. Brave Search is open: we do not believe in walled gardens and, as such, we will offer Brave Search to power other search engines.
With Brave Search, users can choose a default search engine that works seamlessly with the Brave browser to provide a complete privacy-respecting experience. Brave will also explore blockchain-based options and new developments, including for e-commerce uses.

“Brave has grown significantly over the past year, from 11 million monthly active users to over 25 million. We expect to see even greater demand for Brave in 2021 as more and more users demand real privacy solutions to escape Big Tech’s invasive practices,” said Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave Software. “Brave’s mission is to put the user first, and integrating privacy-preserving search into our platform is a necessary step to ensure that user privacy is not plundered to fuel the surveillance economy.”

“We are very happy that our technology is being used at Brave and that, as a result, a genuine, privacy-friendly alternative to Google is being created in the core web functions of browsing and searching,” added Paul-Bernhard Kallen, CEO of Hubert Burda Media. “As a Brave stakeholder we will continue to be involved in this exciting project.”

“The only way to counter Big Tech with its bad habit of collecting personal data is to develop a robust, independent, and privacy-preserving search engine that delivers the quality users have come to expect. People should not be forced to choose between privacy and quality,” said Dr. Josep M. Pujol, head of the Tailcat project. “The team is excited to be working on the only real private search/browser alternative to Big Tech available on the market.”

Brave already offers a privacy-preserving ad platform with Brave Ads, which has delivered nearly 3,000 private ad campaigns in 200 countries with major advertisers such as Verizon, The Home Depot, The New York Times, Progressive Insurance, Chipotle, PayPal, Amazon, Harry’s Razors, CBS, and KIND Snacks. Brave recently launched a privacy-preserving news reader, Brave Today, as well as a Firewall+VPN service, and is testing Brave Together, a privacy-preserving video-conferencing service. With the addition of privacy-preserving search, Brave is further expanding its browser into a super app to give users the control they deserve over their online experience.

Users interested in testing Brave Search can sign up via the waitlist at brave.com/search/.

Source: Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google Search and Google Chrome on both mobile and desktop
 
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F

ForgottenSeer 85179

acquisition of Tailcat, the open search engine developed by the team formerly responsible for the privacy search and browser products at Cliqz, a holding of Hubert Burda Media
Cliqz.
owner of Ghostery,
part of Firefox integration test in 2016 which was a privacy nightmare:
In order to be able to suggest websites to you while you are typing in the browser line (address line, URL line), CLIQZ sends your keystrokes to our servers.

CLIQZ also collects and stores on its servers which website suggestions users select in the CLIQZ for Firefox drop-down menu and the type of suggestions (based on Firefox history, Firefox bookmarks, or CLIQZ search technology). In addition, CLIQZ captures and stores the respective search terms or address entries.

have fun!
 

rain2reign

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Cliqz.
owner of Ghostery,
part of Firefox integration test in 2016 which was a privacy nightmare:


have fun!
They are acquiring it from Cliqz, not whitelabeling their services as I understand. Isn't it a bit too premature saying that the still to be made indexer is a nightmare just based on that? Would rather see how it's newly aqcuired technologies is utilized first, before making a "have fun" judgement. Especially given with Brave's intended direction and reputation for privacy. :unsure:
 

CyberTech

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Brave, the browser which has gained momentum and popularity in recent years, is taking another leap forward in its quest to offer users a more private and secure internet experience. Starting today, Brave browser users will have access to Brave Search in beta, a completely new search engine that offers "unmatched privacy."

Brave Search was announced last March, and since its announcement, it's been tested by more than 100,000 users. Brave, which prides itself on being a "browser reimagined," recently surpassed 32 million monthly active users and is hoping that Brave Search will further its role in the browser market.

The rest
 

CyberTech

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Brave Search has been available in beta for a couple of weeks, and its developers held an AMA (ask Me Anything) session recently on reddit to answer queries from users. Here's what we could gather from it.

Independent Search Indexing​

If you can recall, Brave acquired the Tailcat search engine, to integrate it with Brave Search. As to how the independent indexing works, a representative explained that Brave Search indexes the web based on real-life usage, i.e. good quality sites visited by people (without tracking their usage). Brave doesn't rely completely on machine learning, and user-contribute sites help filter and deliver the best results. The search index is around 9 Billion pages as of now, which only comprises a part of the web, though it is expected to grow as more users perform queries and visit the websites. The company's transparency page which shows the stats of the platform will soon be updated to reflect search-related data.

Latency and Language issues​

The developer team has confirmed that Brave Search has been slow, and that they have received complaints from European users. They clarified that this was due to how they handle the traffic, the search engine's data center is located in the US West Coast, and places further away have higher latencies. Brave is planning on adding more data centers in the future, to address the issue. Some users mentioned that the search engine is not delivering results in the language they chose, and instead displays them in English. This seems to be tied to the Country setting that you have selected.

Full article and the screenshots
 

silversurfer

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Brave adds Discussions to enrich its search results (Brave Search)​

Brave, the maker of the homonymous web browser, has announced a new feature called Discussions that adds conversations from online forums to its privacy-focused search engine.

The new development enriches search results with answers from online discussions, such as threads on Reddit and StackExchange, on any topic.

Until now, Brave Search was limited to website content that can be vague, generic, low quality, and only appear high in results due to SEO optimization.

Brave Search will evaluate search terms and correlate them with online user discussions to give people access to richer or more accurate results for their query.

The topics that Brave believes are going to benefit most from Discussions are:
• Product questions.
• Events.
• Travel-related topics.
• Computer coding questions.
• Very specific queries that don’t have many matches on websites.

“The power of Discussions is that it offers alternative, forum-driven answers to search queries. It meets a human desire for social proof and begins to address the issue of automated content and SEO spam.” says the announcement.
 

plat

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I'm demoing Brave search now. I have to say, I wasn't sure it could replace Duck Duck Go so quickly, but...it did. For now at least.

Fast loading but image and video searches aren't very comprehensive (yet). Think I'll keep it on Firefox a while; so far, pretty decent. I got the Search via the Mozilla add-ons store. A member in this forum posted a YouTube video on search engines very recently and I can't recall who or where it was posted to give the proper credit.

But yeah, thanks for posting the video. Let's see if it works out.

bravesearch.PNG
 

Trooper

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I'm demoing Brave search now. I have to say, I wasn't sure it could replace Duck Duck Go so quickly, but...it did. For now at least.

Fast loading but image and video searches aren't very comprehensive (yet). Think I'll keep it on Firefox a while; so far, pretty decent. I got the Search via the Mozilla add-ons store. A member in this forum posted a YouTube video on search engines very recently and I can't recall who or where it was posted to give the proper credit.

But yeah, thanks for posting the video. Let's see if it works out.


Curious how it will work out for you. I tried it awhile back and results were ok. Sadly I still need to use Google or DDG as my search queries were hit and miss with Brave Search. YMMV.
 

silversurfer

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Brave Search Goggles: boost your favorite sites, downrank or remove others​

Goggles is a new beta feature of Brave Search, which may be used to customize the default results listing of the search engine.

Goggles are simple, self-contained text files which can be hosted in Github or Gitlab. These files contain instructions allowing you to tell Brave Search howyou'd like your results to be ranked. You can target specific URL patterns (and, soon, website titles and other aspects of Web pages) and indicate how their ranking should be altered (e.g.boosted, downranked, or completely discarded from the results).

Goggles, which is currently in Beta, allows anyone to create private or public instructions. The beta launched with eight public customization options, which users may select directly on Brave Search or launch directly through specific search URLs.

Here is the list of available Goggles:
  • Tech blogs -- gives several tech blogs a boost in the search results.
  • Hacker News / 1k short -- domains popular with the Hacker News community are boosted.
  • No Pinterest -- removes Pinterest from search results.
  • Left Sources / Right Sources -- boosts left-leaning or right-leaning sources in search.
  • Rust programming - re-ranks result to boost Rust related content.
  • Copycats removal -- removes copycat content from search.
  • 1k short -- removes results from the top 1K websites.
 

silversurfer

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Brave Search introduces the Summarizer, an AI tool for synthesized, relevant results​

Today we’re thrilled to announce the latest AI-powered feature in Brave Search: the Summarizer.

The Summarizer provides concise and to-the-point answers at the top of Brave Search results pages, in response to the user’s input, solely based on Web search results. Unlike a purely generative AI model, which is prone to spout unsubstantiated assertions, we trained our large language models (LLMs) to process multiple sources of information present on the Web. This produces a more concise, accurate answer, expressed in coherent language.

In addition, the provenance of original sources of data is cited at all times via links. This maintains the rightful attribution of information, and helps users assess the trustworthiness of the sources, both of which are needed to mitigate the authority biases of large language models.

The Brave Summarizer is available today for all users of Brave Search, on desktop and mobile. For users who would prefer not to use the Summarizer, they can easily turn it off by opting out in settings.
 

HarborFront

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I asked Brave Search the below question

1677858681150.png


I expect the Summarizer to say I should have at least 10 000 nuclear warheads, hypersonic missiles, laser weapons, thousands of drones, chemical stockpiles, elite military troops, space weapons, bombers, 6th gen fighter jets, stealth military hardware, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered subs with nuclear-powered torpedoes etc

Quite disappointed with the answer :rolleyes:
 
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HarborFront

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Summarizer not working? I asked the same question today but no Summarizer display. Also, why is the word "brave" missing beside the lion head? Using FF here


:rolleyes:

1678327058959.png
 
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goodjohnjr

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Summarizer not working? I asked the same question today but no Summarizer display. Also, why is the word "brave" missing beside the lion head? Using FF here


:rolleyes:

View attachment 273429
I just did the same search in Brave Search in Brave Browser, the Summarizer did not give me a response either, it does not work for every search & they probably made adjustments; but Brave does show next to the Brave logo.

I recommend checking all your Brave Search settings and maybe make sure that your ad blocker and / or DNS and / or something else is not blocking the logo.

Here is what my search results looked like:

Brave Search Screenshot 2023-03-09 211116.png
 
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